Where It Began

This is what I remember:

How everything leading up to the party is nothing special.

Me and Billy in the front seat of Billy’s car.

Billy pulling onto the front lawn of the house on Songbird Lane. Heading toward the big front door that opens and then shuts out three and a half hours of my life.

My life, which, by the time I wake up on the ground clutching the car keys with my head bashed in, is pretty much over.

Only I don’t know that right away.

A terrific read! Ann Redisch Stampler puts you in Gabby’s head and keeps you there until the gripping conclusion. A writer to watch! —ALEX FLINN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beastly

ANNSTAMPLER.COM

Sometimes the end is just the beginning.

Gabby lived under the radar until her makeover. Way under. But when she started her senior year as a blonder, better-dressed version of herself, she struck gold: Billy Nash believed she was the f lawless girl she was pretending to be. The next eight months with Billy were bliss. . . . Until the night Gabby wakes up on the ground next to the remains of his BMW without a single memory of how she got there.

And Billy’s nowhere to be found.

All Gabby wants is to make everything perfect again. But getting her life back isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. Because nothing is the same, and Gabby’s beginning to realize she’s missed more than a few danger signs along the way.

It’s time for Gabby to face the truth, even if it means everything changes.

Especially if it means everything changes.

Where It Began marks Ann Redisch Stampler’s YA debut. She is the author of several picture books, including The Rooster Prince of Breslov. Her books have been an Aesop Accolade winner, Sydney Taylor Honor and Notable Books, a National Jewish Book Awards finalist and winner, and Bank Street Best Books of the Year. Ann lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Rick.

Jacket designed by Jessica Handelman

Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Getty Images

Author photograph by Sonya Sones

Simon Pulse

SIMON & SCHUSTER, NEW YORK

Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at

TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com

where it began

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SIMON PULSE

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

First Simon Pulse hardcover edition March 2012 Copyright © 2012 by Ann Redisch Stampler All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.

For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Designed by Mike Rosamilia The text of this book was set in Bembo. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stampler, Ann Redisch. Where it began / by Ann Redisch Stampler. — 1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Summary: After she is in a horrific car crash when drunk, Los Angeles high school student Gabriella Gardiner assumes she stole her rich boyfriend’s car and smashed it into a tree, but she cannot remember anything about the events of the evening.

ISBN 978-1-4424-2321-3 (hardcover)

[1. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 2. Alcoholism—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. Peer pressure—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.S78614Wh 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2011011726

ISBN 978-1-4424-2323-7 (eBook)

For Rick and Laura and Michael,

again, still, always

Contents

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Part Two

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter XLVII

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLIX

Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Part Three

Chapter LIV

Chapter LV

Chapter LVI

Chapter LVII

Chapter LVIII

Chapter LIX

Chapter LX

Chapter LXI

Chapter LXII

Chapter LXIII

Chapter LXIV

Chapter LXV

Chapter LXVI

Chapter LXVII

Chapter LXVIII

Chapter LXIX

Chapter LXX

Chapter LXXI

Chapter LXXII

Chapter LXXIII

Acknowledgments

where it began

part one

I

THIS IS HOW IT STARTS: SOME HAPLESS GIRL IN A skanky little tank top lying on her back in the wet grass somewhere in Hidden Hills. She is gazing at the stars through the leaves of a eucalyptus tree. The trunk of the eucalyptus tree is wrapped in Billy Nash’s blue BMW. Midnight-blue. The girl is trying to figure out what’s going on, beyond the more obvious facts: a mouth lined with a sick combination of beer and stale vodka, a crunched-up car with black smoke pouring out of it, a night sky filled with glassy constellations and a big white moon.

There are certain unavoidable conclusions.

Even so, the girl is trying to remember the particulars. The keg, maybe. The crash. She is trying to remember who she is and what happened to whoever that person might be.

She is trying to remember she is me.

When I wake up, I am wired to machines. Everything looks somewhat gray. I check to see if my toes can wiggle and I start counting my fingers, which proves to be more challenging than you’d expect. I’m pretty sure they’re all there, but I keep having to start over around finger number six.

Someone speaks, but it doesn’t make sense, pieces of words and random syllables. It occurs to me that I might be on some fairly serious drugs. Then I go back to counting my six fingers.

Just after this, or maybe way later, it is hard to tell, someone else says, Good morning, Sunshine.

I start to say, Good morning, but I end up throwing up instead. Which is evidently a good thing. I am surrounded by happy, blurry, celebrating people in scrubs.

Someone grabs my hand and yells Good morning! again, enunciating all the consonants in case I’m deaf or speak Serbo-Croatian. My name remains a mystery of life, but I do remember this horrible story about a gray-haired old lady discovered locked up in a mental hospital in Chicago or someplace, where she’d been stuck since she was sixteen years old when a policeman found her wandering the streets speaking Serbo-Croatian. Only nobody knew it was Serbo-Croatian so they decided that she must be crazy and locked her up basically forever.

Whoever I am, I’m pretty sure that I’m not her.

Then it occurs to me that all these greenish-gray, blurry-looking figures I’ve been thinking of as people might actually be space aliens doing a bad job of pretending to be human. I try to go back to counting the fingers, but this is hard with the big happy alien clutching my hand as if she is afraid that I might make a break for it and cut out of the mother ship if she let go.

I try to get my hand back, which is cause for further celebration.

The hand-grabbing alien is wearing a V-neck scrub shirt with bunnies all over it. "Can you tell us your naaaaame?" she yells over and over.

I am still trying to reclaim the hand.

I hear myself saying, Bunnies.

They all echo me and someone writes it down, or writes down something. I can hear the ballpoint scratch against the paper, harsh and loud.

"That’s very goooooood! someone else says. I have made the space clones ecstatic. You’ve been in a car accident, Bunny," she shouts cheerfully.

The car. I sort of remember the car.

"You probably feel a little sick, but you’re going to be fine. Dear? We need to know your last name too. What’s your last name, Bunny?"

By now I am overwhelmed by the mystery of the situation. Although, I am in command of several key facts:

1. My name is not Bunny.

2. I have ten fingers, or at least I have six, and none of them actually seems to be missing.

3. I might or might not be in a hospital somewhere.

Ideas float through my head like big, goofy cartoons. Elephants and bunny shirts and bags.

My ID, I say.

Heidi! they say. That’s great! Are you Heidi?

ID, I say. Look in my bag. Give me my wallet.

All right, so I have no idea who I am, but at least I’m not stupid. This is something of a relief.

I’m afraid the paramedics didn’t find it, honey, Bunny Shirt says. Let’s see if you can tell me what day it is today.

This seems like an exceptionally stupid, random question under the circumstances.

Calendar, I say.

They seem to be missing a lot of important items around here, such as calendars, and where is my bag? I remember my bag. It is the small, black fabric Prada bag, the kind with the leather strap and not the woven cloth one. The kind you can buy somewhat cheaply on the Internet and look somewhat richer than you really are. Unlike Louis Vuitton bags, which are always fake on the Internet and everyone can tell you bought some cheap, fake bag and you just look like a poseur.

There: car accident, toes and fingers, no name, no ID, and an encyclopedic knowledge of bags. I try to think about bags. What else do I know about them? I know I want mine back. Did they leave it in the car?

Look in the car, I say.

The aliens chirp and huddle, letting go of the hand. I think about escaping, but I don’t seem to be able to move. Also, there are tubes coming out of the back of my hand and the crook of my elbow. There are wires glued to my chest.

Okay, Heidi, Bunny Shirt says, turning back with a great big toothy smile that makes her look like she might want to suck blood out of my neck. "The car you were driving is registered to Agnes and William B. Nash. Could you be Agnes?"

Billy! I say.

I remember Billy. Billy Nash. William B-for-Barnsdale Nash. I remember him in glorious and perfect detail, his hair and his shoulders and the salty smell of him.

Is Billy all right?

The nurse-like creature strokes my arm. You were the only person by the car, dear, she says.

All right. So just after I was in some car crash that I don’t remember, I was kidnapped by helpful aliens. The first part makes about as much sense as the second part. And oh, right, I did all this without my bag, which I ditched somewhere just before losing my mind.

Can you tell me your whole name now? the nurse asks, still stroking my arm. Can you remember who you are?

How could she know that the second I remembered Billy, I knew who I was too?

So I tell them my name and they all go scurrying off someplace to celebrate without me.

II

MOSTLY I SLEEP THROUGH ENDLESS DAY. THE ROOM is always light and everybody still looks slightly gray. Every time I open my eyes, I expect to see Billy—only he would be golden. He is, when my eyes are closed.

But it’s just Vivian.

She is sitting in the corner on a green plastic chair, maybe too far away for me to see her clearly. Or maybe in her quest to look as if she’s made of ten-years-younger, wrinkle-free plastic sheeting, my mother has found a way to get herself permanently, cosmetically airbrushed so nobody can see her all that clearly.

I think about her face melting into a fuzzy, greenish blur, and then I start thinking about the mass quantity of drugs that must be dripping into me through the IV and about how to speed it up.

This is when Vivian puts down her magazine and wafts across the room to loom over my bed. I can see that she is wearing her tasteful mauve and plum makeup with the matte finish and matching mauve, no-sparkles nail polish she wears for funerals and teacher conferences, and it hits me that I might actually be in a real hospital on the verge of death.

I wonder what would happen if I just sort of reached up and squeezed the bag that’s feeding the IV tube.

What I say is, Where’s Billy?

Vivian gives me her strained imitation of a cheery smile.

Hey, Gabby, she says, as if she were some happy, sappy character from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as if she were pretending to be somebody’s mother. Let’s take this one step at a time, okay? Let’s just get you okay and out of the hospital.

Brain-dead as I am, I know and she knows and everyone who ever laid eyes on me since September knows that I’m not going to be okay without Billy.

For a second I have this horrible thought that maybe the nurse is lying and something bad happened to him. Maybe Billy was run over and is crushed and dead and laid out behind a William Barnsdale Nash plaque in the Nash family crypt where we made out, Billy dressed up like a vampire and me a cross between a really slutty French maid and a zombie, on Halloween.

Otherwise, why wouldn’t he come see me?

Where’s Billy?

Vivian leans over the railing that’s supposed to keep me in the bed. Maybe you should have thought of that before you plowed his car into a tree, she says softly, as if this could pass for some form of a helpful suggestion.

I can tell that I am crying because a tear is blazing an acid trail down the side of my face.

Don’t touch! Vivian lunges through the tangle of tubes and wires toward my seriously bandaged hands.

What? I say. What happened to my face? Oh God, do my hands work? What did I do?

The bed bobs and lurches like a space raft floating in the gray-green sky. I can tell that the nurse is injecting something soothing and potent into the tube that goes directly to my veins. I can tell that Vivian is saying something soothing and insincere. I open my eye and Vivian whirls into the distance in the plastic chair, her hair streaming behind her. The doctors multiply in kaleidoscope formation, at the center of which is the tiny white light that they shine into my eye.

Before sunrise, when the room is vibrating with pale fluorescent light, I can see the space debris that’s been floating in the corner of my eye is a bouquet of ugly Mylar balloons. The watercolor clouds are flowers, mostly half-dead, showy ones, with cheesy stuffed animals stuck in the crooks of branches stiff with curled, dry leaves.

I have been here long enough for flowers to wilt.

I rattle the railing on the side of the bed, wondering what happens when my feet touch the floor. If I can walk away.

As it turns out, I can’t.

Bunny Shirt and her minions tuck my legs under a warm blanket so tight I can’t move. Then they crank up the railings.

Gabby, Vivian whispers, do you remember what you did? Even the tiniest, teensiest detail?

Nope.

Well, the doctor says that with this kind of head trauma and all those, um, substances, you might not remember . . . I guess you might not remember yet.

Then she tries playing games.

Okay, Gabby, let’s try this: When I say ‘party,’ what pops into your mind? Just go with it. Don’t even try to think about it.

As if I could think.

"Okay, what if I say ‘Songbird Lane?’ Okay . . . Songbird Lane . . . Gabby, will you please just try this? The police want to talk to you, and I’m not sure how long I can hold them off."

Songbird Lane?

I would tell her if anything was in there.

Maybe I would.

Voices drift in through the doorway.

Even if I let you talk with her, what would be the point? somebody murmurs. It’s a closed head injury and she just rambles. Good luck making sense of it.

My injured head rolls toward the sound, and there is Bunny Shirt in silhouette. Bunny Shirt and someone with a gun.

Look, I know you’re just doing your job, but this won’t take long, the lady with the gun says.

You’re not going in there.

I just need to take her statement, Gun Lady says. It’ll take three minutes, tops. Can’t she talk?

Sure, she can talk, says Bunny Shirt. She thinks her name is Heidi and she lives in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Come on. You’ve got her blood alcohol level. They brought her in with car keys in her hand. What else do you need?

You would think some part of this would have made a lasting impression.

You would think that after Billy didn’t show up and my mother kept hissing about what I did and averting her gaze, it would occur to me that there might be some serious problem here.

You would think.

III

WHEN I COME TO, VIVIAN IS READING THE CARDS that are stuck in the flower arrangements, writing down who sent them in the tiny spiral notebook she carries around.

Everybody sent you flowers, she says. You would think this was a good thing, but you can tell it isn’t. Everybody knows.

Did Billy send me something?

They sent you a lovely bouquet, Vivian says, not looking up.

The Nashes did. She flicks away a helium-filled balloon dog that is hovering over the foot of the bed and starts foraging for the Nashes’ lovely bouquet.

I start looking around for some sumptuous floral extravaganza, given that the Nashes could basically afford to send me a whole tulip farm and a live-in Dutch florist if they felt like it. But it turns out they’d come up with a particularly weird combination of green and red oversized lilies that look left over from Christmas with a smiley face card that says, Wishing you all the best for a speedy recovery!!! signed, The Nash Family.

Which is when it happens: when the story of my life starts to show up in mosaic splinter flashes in my head. Which is when Agnes Nash shows up in my head—with horns and a red pointy tail and little cloven hooves and an Armani suit. Which I take to be a drug-induced yet totally insightful vision of her.

You could see her making her assistant’s assistant go order this bouquet and this particular card, the most impersonal, meanest thing she could think of that wouldn’t make people jump to the conclusion that she was the Great Satan of the Three B’s—Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills—where, in my personal opinion, you have to try pretty hard to be the really Great Satan and not just some random devil due to all the competition.

Did I mention Billy’s mother doesn’t like me a whole lot?

Apparently, it takes more than a eucalyptus tree to bang this particular fact out of your head.

Agnes Nash’s face the first time I saw her.

Agnes Nash’s eyes the first time she saw me with Billy.

Billy, who walks three inches off the ground, is the mainstay of the Winston School water polo team, and gets anything he wants out of anyone he wants it from because he is just so charming and gorgeous and basically the first person you notice in a room full of people only you look away really fast because you don’t want him to think that you’re staring at him, which you are.

Every time Agnes sees me with him, she kind of looks me over and makes a little face like once again, she has considered my many fine attributes, and once again, she can’t figure out what Billy is doing with me.

We have these generic little conversations in which she says, So, Gabriella, are you thinking about college? and I can tell I’m supposed to haul out some Ivy League fight song or start panting "Oh Stanford, oh Stanford, oh give it to me Stanford, oh Stanford!"

But instead, I just sort of stand there muttering something incoherent about art school. How there is a really good art school just down the road in Pasadena.

Big frown. Agnes is maybe as enthused about art school as my parents.

Well, Rhode Island School of Design is supposed to be good and it’s right next door to (bow head and genuflect) Brown, right?

You can tell she has to exert a lot of effort just to keep her eyes from rolling. You can tell she’d be a whole lot happier with Billy hooking up with the kind of girl who is going to cheerlead her Advanced Placement butt into (angels playing harps) Yale. Not the kind of girl whose reach school is some art school next door to (bow your head) Brown but not actually (well, you know) Brown, and who probably is going to end up in some pokey college in South Dakota with a bad art department because, in the first place, my parents would never pay for me to go to art school, and in the second place, no doubt even art school can figure out who is sub-regular.

The kind of girl who isn’t me.

Still, as long as I don’t interfere with Agnes’s plan for Billy’s life—Do Not get kicked out of Winston School; Do Not, no matter how plowed, do lines in front of Coach; Do Not get caught violating your probation; Get into (drum roll) Princeton—she is happy enough to give Billy the keys to the beach house and look the other way when he takes me there.

Even trapped in this electric hospital bed, dizzy, smelling sour, and with Swiss cheese for brains, I can see where if she didn’t like me all that much back when I was just some ordinary, stupid excuse for a girlfriend, she might be even less happy with me now that I’m Billy’s drunken car-wrecker girlfriend.

Still, it seems north of cold that Billy is staying away from me now, which I suddenly decide—probably as a result of my bruised brain sloshing from one side of my head to the other and not as a result of actual thought—has to be because of Agnes.

Or, it occurs to me: Vivian.

What about that? Her Rule to Live By is that no one gets to see you when you Don’t Look Good. As far as she’s concerned, if you look fine and you send Everything-Is-Fine vibes out into the universe, then everything will magically be fine.

Right.

Only you’re not supposed to think Right in a dubious frame of mind. You’re supposed to go, Everything is freaking swell. Because: If you give the universe the slightest hint that things suck, such as by slouching around being realistic about the fact that your life actually does suck, then the